California Apparel News

Nadeem Ballaj has worked on all sides of business, ranging from wholesaling sportswear to managing websites for fashion companies and entrepreneurs. Prior to his latest venture, the Los Angeles–based businessman concluded that a lot of technology designed to improve business might contribute to entrepreneurs losing sales.

All of the communications tools that business owners currently have at their fingertips—phone, email, website and social media—never reach all of the people that an entrepreneur needs to contact in order to introduce new products or to make announcements. When entrepreneurs can’t get their messages through, they miss out on sales.

Ballaj said that his new platform, SeeBiz, is a new angle in customer-relationship management.

“It’s a unique platform,” he said. “It’s social CRM.”

SeeBiz will offer an expansive platform for managing contacts. It also will provide tools for back-office jobs and sales. He described it as a mix of Facebook, Quikbooks and the e-market Alibaba.com.

He is introducing this platform to a wide array of businesses, which includes fashion brands. The fashion business has long been criticized for being slow to adapt to new technology. However, in the past decade, new sales platforms such as Joor and BrandBoom have gained popularity in fashion-business circles.

SeeBiz is currently in beta testing. Ballaj anticipates officially releasing it in the spring.

“My goal is to help small businesses eliminate overhead and basically save time and money,” he said. Currently, more than 1,500 American businesses, which range from apparel to home goods and herbal medicine, are part of the beta test.

Businesses working on SeeBiz join its network and participate in a platform where they can make business profiles and digital showrooms that exhibit products. Companies also can sell products and make orders for goods in their digital showrooms. With the social-media style platform, they also can use tools such as instant messaging and chat.

On another SeeBiz screen, businesses can work on back-office tasks such as invoicing as well as inventory management. This part of the platform also can assemble sales reports. Eventually, the platform will offer a place to handle shipping.

SeeBiz is a company that runs on the Amazon Cloud system. Participation in the SeeBiz social network is free. However, the company will eventually charge fees for hosting back-office tasks such as inventory management, Ballaj said. Businesses will not be charged any fees during a trial period upon joining the platform.